INFORMAL WORK: AGENCY AND NETWORK CONSTRUCTION

Abstract

Informal work is an important form of work organization, especially for those marginalized in the formal market and in view of the current flexibility in labor relations. According to IBGE, in 2019 38.6 million Brazilians worked in the informal market. Focusing on self-employed workers, the article proposes to discuss two aspects related to them: the agency capacity necessary for their organization and the construction of weak ties networks to maintain this form of work. To this end, a bibliographic review on approaches to the new economic sociology was used, from authors such as Norman Long, Pierre Bourdieu and Mark Granovetter. It was found that such perspectives help to understand the sociability and organization of self-employed workers in the face of changes in the labor market.